As an excellent project management tool, ProWorkflow offers a lot of things. We have a place to manage projects, tasks, contacts, notes. We even offer quoting and invoicing, which is a feature a lot of our clients appreciate.  

But one of the notable omissions from our repertoire is a Gantt Chart; an extremely popular graphing tool that displays the overall timeline of a project.  

Oops? Not really.

A Gantt Style Chart

If you’re one of our clients, you may be jumping by now “but what about the Timeline feature? I see it every day, it’s a graph that I use to plan my project timelines!” 

Well, our timeline feature technically is not a Gantt Chart in the true sense of the term. Rather it is a Gantt style chart. It looks and functions in a very similar way to any good old Gantt chart that is out there. But it is somewhat different in a few key areas, namely the Critical Path and Dependencies.  

Gantt chart frustrations

While Critical Path and Dependencies are entirely useful and even important features for the planning stage, Proworkflow decided to go in a slightly different direction! A formalized Gantt Chart definitely has its uses. However, if you’ve tried using one of these charts at the execution stage, there is a good chance you’ve run into a few frustrations with them too. 

With the level of detail provided by a Gantt Chart, a layer of complexity is added that can become counter-intuitive very quickly.  When the system prevents you from making seemingly simple changes because no way should it upset the critical path or a dependent task, arms may go up in frustration. This becomes worse if you weren’t the one who planned this project. You can quickly find yourself asking ‘Why is Task C dependent on Task E, and why on earth does that have an impact on Task H?’ 

Intuitive, Powerful and Simple

ProWorkflow was designed as a comprehensive project management tool. Everything we add to our tool needs to fall in line with that model; intuitive, powerful and simple, all at once.

So, should you ever find yourself looking at our Timelines and wondering why our Gantt chart is not quite a Gantt chart; it was just designed with you in mind.